Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/240

 224 HISTORY OF GREECE. attacked the Milesians, and took the Ionic city of Priene, but this possession cannot have been maintained, for the city appears afterwards as autonomous. 1 His long reign, however, was signal- ized by two events, both of considerable moment to the Asiatic Greeks ; the invasion of the Cimmerians, and the first ap- proach to collision, at least the first of which we have any his- torical knowledge, between the inhabitants of Lydia and those of Upper Asia under the Median kings. It is affirmed by all authors that the Medes were originally numbered among the subjects of the great Assyrian empire, of which Nineveh or Ninos,as the Greeks call it was the chief town, and Babylon one of the principal portions. That the pop- ulation and power of these two great cities, as well as of several others which the Ten Thousand Greeks in their march found ruined and deserted in those same regions, is of high antiquity, 2 there is no room for doubting ; but it is noway incumbent upon a historian of Greece to entangle himself in the mazes of Assyrian chronology, or to weigh the degree of credit to which the conflict- ing statements of Herodotus, Ktesias, Berosus, Abydenus, etc. are entitled. With the Assyrian empire, 3 which lasted, accord- ing to Herodotus, five hundred and twenty years, according to Ktesias, thirteen hundred and sixty years, the Greeks have no ascertainable connection : the city of Nineveh appears to have been taken by the Medes a little before the year GOO B. c. (in so far as the chronology can be made out), and exercised no influence 1 Herodot. i, 15. 2 Xenophon, Anabas. iii, 4, 7 ; 10, 11. 3 Herodot. i, 95; Ktesias, Fragm. Assyr. xiii, p. 419, ed.Bahr ; Diodor. ii. 21. Ktesias gives thirty generations of Assyrian kings from Ninyas to Sar- danapalus: Velleius, 33; Eusebius, 35; Syncellus, 40 ; Castor, 27; Cepha- lion, 23. See Bahr ad Ctesiam, p. 428. The Babylonian chronology of Bcrosus (a priest of Belus, about 280 B. c.) gave 86 kings and 34,000 years from the Deluge to the Median occupation of Babylon ; then 1,453 years down to the reign of Phul king of Assyria (Berosi Fragmcnta, p. 8, ccl. Richter). Mr. Clinton sets forth the chief statements and discrepancies respecting Assyrian chronology in his Appendix, c. 4. But the suppositions to which he resorts, in order to bring them into harmony, appear tome uncertified and gratuitoos. Compare the different, but not more successful, track followed by Larchoj (Chronologic, c. 3, pp. 145-157).